When the opportunity came to found a worker cooperative in November 2020 right in the middle of a global pandemic lockdown, the answer was an emphatic “let’s do it!” It has meant that deep thinking and questioning of how and why we work has become essential to the foundational structure of the co-op. The journey to build, revise, and further develop continues, and we expect that to be an ongoing, healthy process for us.
Project CO+OP provides professional services and develops its own projects based on the interests of its members. This includes services in architecture for various project types like multi-family residential, mixed use, single-family residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional. We provide urban design and community planning and are currently doing that for the densest and decidedly diverse square mile in Maine, the Parkside Neighborhood in Portland. Our mission mandates that our work maintain focus on sustainability and equity as a central value for all that we do. To that end, we provide full spectrum sustainability consulting services not only on the projects we design, but for other architects, developers, building owners, those seeking Passive House Certification, and for those that may otherwise have barriers to benefitting from sustainability design thinking.
We encourage anyone looking to lighten their environmental impact to reach out. As a business, we are seeking to grow these offerings as a proportion of revenue and as a measure of our co-op’s positive impact. Previously throughout the construction industry, professional sustainability consulting had been limited to either large projects or those who could afford a premium. Many believed “green” building was expensive and unattainable for smaller, modest projects. We’re devoted to changing that.
Our members have other diverse interests and skills that are leading into other directions that both intersect and diverge from the themes of our professional services. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. Currently we are developing both traditional software and iOS applications in the realms of architecture and outdoor expedition planning. And, we’re prototyping and field testing a number of outdoor industry products we hope to release in the coming year.
With all that is before the co-op, CMBA membership has been an incredible resource. Great thanks go to Emmy Andersson for helping our co-op figure out how to co-op quicker and with more gusto than we could have hoped alone. Connecting with other cooperatives in Maine has been useful, confidence building, and we hope to reciprocate to others once we have more time in operation.
Finalizing our cooperative structure continues to be an interesting challenge. Worker cooperatives centering on mission driven professional and sustainability services do not appear to be common among cooperatives. Although, great similar examples do exist, like Placetailor in Massachusetts and New Frameworks in Vermont and we believe we are on course. We would like to connect with other small worker cooperatives who might offer advice on finalizing initial agreements and instituting cooperative systems for the first time. We want to keep it simple, clear, and effective.
Excited to cooperate with you all!
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PROJECT CO+OP BY VISTITING THEIR WEBSITE: WWW.PROJECT.COOP